Public Places
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After Christmas is a critical time to get all the mulch on and make sure everything is pruned and tidy and ready to go. The flooding was quite a spanner in the works
get the work done now, what with a visitor presence all year round? “The way we worked, you could block paths off, but now we have to think about access and things like that. You have to come up with alternative routes for wheelchair access. It’s just a different way of thinking about it; you just change how you work,” Mark says. John prefers it. “I’ve been in gardens
before where you had to put a massive amount of effort in so that it looked pristine when the garden reopened in spring. Whereas now, you never have that because it hopefully always looks good. On the other hand, it was nice when visitors weren’t there so we could leave tarps down.” “Another consideration is bad weather in
the winter and we have to be careful about high winds and the possibility of people getting hit by falling branches. We have to be more careful with the tree surveys and keep an eye on the wind speed,” John says. The bad weather at the end of last year
brought problems with which many people will be familiar, with heavy flooding on Boxing Day washing away a lot of the new part of the garden. Paths disappeared completely and old drainage pipes were exposed. “We phoned around and pretty much the whole team turned out on New Year’s Eve, plus a lot of volunteers and our regional director and property manager. We had a massive clear up day in the pouring rain.” “The visual impact of the floods was
devastating. We found many of our newly planted trees, with their roots exposed and labels on, caught in low branches downriver, as well as huge quantities of silt and debris - and even a pair of underpants that gave us something to laugh about rather than cry!” It wasn’t all fun and games though,
despite John’s light-hearted tone. “It set us back about a month. After Christmas is a critical time to get all the mulch on and make sure everything is pruned and tidy and ready to go. The flooding was quite a spanner in the works.”
102 I PC JUNE/JULY 2016 The area around Bodnant gets about forty-
eight inches of rain a year, Mark says, but they are certainly not the rainiest site. “We get localised weather here. We get the rain shadow effect from the mountains. We are fortunate because we don’t have the hard winters - a minus 3 to minus 5O
C for a couple
of days is probably the worst it gets.” The terraces are south and west facing and, therefore, the microclimate created means there are plants that you wouldn’t expect to see growing at all in North Wales. The attention to detail in the garden is obvious, and it is clear that high standards are maintained. “If you want the diversity and the full range of plants that this garden is well known for, then higher maintenance is the order of the day, and you get more visitors and it’s more rewarding for us as well,” John says. In between the major projects, the team are upgrading certain areas that need
revamping every so often. “The Yucca garden will have a complete overhaul in a year or so and all the terraces also. My predecessor started introducing a lot more herbaceous plants into the garden, but the trouble with herbaceous is every four or five years you then need to revamp them.” The herbaceous border on the Canal Terrace had become particularly tired when it came out to make space for the wildflowers this year. “That was originally done in 1994, so it had been in the best part of twenty years, and it showed. Instead of things being at 6ft, they were down at 3ft,” Mark tells me. This does give them the option of changing design however, which is something that John is very keen on: “One of the great things about Bodnant is that it’s not stuck in a time warp as some historic gardens are. So there’s something about this garden that’s always at the cutting edge of design. It gives us the opportunity to do new
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